@towerful I mainly program in Go, so when I see all that extra software I notice how much easier it is when I get to just rely on the Go runtime. It does a lot of the heavy lifting done here, but the resulting code is not as clean. Actually just today I read through Mastodon’s code to track down a bug in my in-progress ActivityPub service (in Go) and found the Ruby really easy to navigate!

@programmer_humor

@Socsa But what about in practice?

@programming

@Aatube Oh I wouldn’t be so sure… we’ve all had those colleagues and vendors where we think they’d import something like this to make our lives miserable ;)

@programming

@Mad_Punda it’s funny because the name “overtime” loses meaning when it becomes normal. I hereby propose the name “overovertime” (I’m good at names that’s why I’m a great programmer)

@programming

@copygirl Oh man, is non-AI assisted programming old-school already? :(

@programming

@SpaceNoodle I’ll always be sad how GitHub helped popularise centralised workflows. Such an amazing opportunity for a big cultural shift, but it didn’t go anyway as far as it could have.

@programmer_humor

@pkill Yeah seems that way, judging by their scaling up documentation: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/scaling/

Although hey, it all depends on a whole bunch of stuff written in super optimised (and kinda scary) C !

@programmer_humor

Mastodon is written in Ruby. Nowhere near as big as Facebook or the ML field, but hey, it’s important to a couple of us at least :)

@programming @nifty

I get where you’re coming from. But not everyone who falls for this stuff is “stupid”. Some are just vulnerable - maybe just temporarily - and once you’re in, it’s an awful slippery slope.

I don’t know how many are just vulnerable and how many are good Darwin award nominees.

@technology @Tristaniopsis

Absolutely!

Although… snail mail is also legislated to be secure. It’s not used as often because there is a more convenient, better(?) alternative: fax. I wish some funding for so-called “AI” projects could be used to develop even more convenient/better alternatives to fax. There are messaging protocols but they seemed crazy.

Payment systems are crazy too. Stripe did all the boring work and now there is a convenient interface for payment processing: Stripe’s HTTP API.

@technology @Car

Might be closer than you think. The White House is just using Instagram right now: https://www.whitehouse.gov
(See section “featured media”)

@stockRot @technology

Super interesting story - thanks for sharing. Helps getting perspective:

> the data centres proposed by Conifex would have consumed 2.5 million
> megawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s enough to power and heat
> more than 570,000 apartments

@Wiitigo @technology

A link to the video could be shared via ActivityPub.
The video would be loaded over HTTPS; we can verify that the video is from the white house, and that it hasn’t been modified in-transit.

A big issue is that places don’t want to share a link to an independently verifiable video, they want you to load a copy of it from their website/app. This way we build trust with the brand (e.g. New York Times), and spend more time looking at ads or subscribe.
@stockRot @technology

Fax machines are still used in healthcare!
There is an overwhelming amount of healthcare admin where software could help.
Computers are designed for messaging, data manipulation, deduplication… stuff that people are drowning in because the existing software sucks or doesn’t exist.
Yet we see pie-in-the-sky “AI” (LLMs? who knows?) projects being funded.

(I worked as a manager at an Australian general practice. Assuming the US is similar? )

@technology @throws_lemy

@agressivelyPassive

> Part of the reason for bloat is the fact that frameworks and libraries became huge

Absolutely. What I find funny is that the inverse is kinda true, too. Tiny dependencies (as seen in the Javascript world) are also to blame. They’re so small, I’ve noticed some devs say “well it’s so small, what’s the harm of one more?”. Bloat by a thousand deps.

@programming

@solrize 43 years young.

When I hear people talk about system issues (e.g. complex microservice architectures) I thought it was all cutting-edge problems of cutting-edge tech. Looks like people have been running into the same things for decades!

@programming

“innovation”

@TCB13 @programming

@Vendetta9076 @InformalTrifle A system to centralise the management of mobile devices like iPhones and iPads remotely. Usually used by companies to provision devices automatically and dictate apps can be installed and have email/calenders etc. configured automatically.

See also https://it-training.apple.com/tutorials/deployment/dm005

@skullgiver Oh wow thanks! :) One program syncs my home Mastodon timeline, with all replies, to a Maildir. Dovecot serves that over IMAP. Sending involves a custom SMTP server which reads the mail message and creates a post from it.

For Mastodon it was all about converting statuses (toots? Posts?) into RFC 5322 messages. Using the status’ ID as Message-Id in the message header is handy. Mail clients do the heavy lifting of rendering threads thankfully!

@MicroWave So, what type of high would you get by rolling a fat J full of Trump and smoking it in a courtroom?